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The Festive Season Of Online Customer Servie

Online Customer Service

Neldi RautenbachMonday 11th April 2016

Festive online customer service?

‘Buddy the elf, what’s YOUR favourite colour?’ For even the most festive of us, who loves Christmas, sometimes the festive season can feel a bit overwhelming. With bargain hunters sad that Black Friday and Cyber Monday are ghosts from a Christmas past, retailers are gearing up for the next big event on the Christmas calendar, Boxing Day.

But we are not rushing to the glittery tinsel tantalising shop windows on the seasonal High Street. We are spending our time online, choosing to shop via the internet, doing our research, hoping to find that perfect gift – or at least something that won’t need to be exchanged or returned in the New Year.

With the Christmas season starting earlier each year it’s no surprise that Boxing Day sales too, have started as early as mid-December this year.

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas

Experian-IMRG expects 2015 UK online shopping figures for November and December figures to exceed £27bn. That’s up by 37 percent from just three years ago. And Verdict Retail forecast 44.9 percent growth in online spending over the next five years as it becomes a bigger proportion of all our shopping.

According to Google, 2015 has been the most connected holiday shopping season ever. 78% of consumers reported that they researched their shopping on the net with a further 40% of consumers doing their shopping online. And big money was spent through small screens as 53% of consumers who shopped online, did so using their smartphones or tablets.

Stuff that turkey

As the value of what we spend online increases, so does the number of orders, parcels, and pressure on customer service departments. Being prepared for this online shopping phenomenon will be paramount to the success of an organisation, with almost one in four of this year’s online orders being placed in November and December.

Shocking figures from last year however, show UK retailers and logistics firms caught off-guard by this spike in online traffic – as shoppers held off buying until the last minute, still expecting to have good customer experiences – which resulted in delays, bottlenecks and thousands of disgruntled online consumers.

All I want for Christmas is a good customer service strategy

Investing in a good customer service strategy combined with having the right technology in place, is key to having a competitive advantage (and to prepare for the onslaught of customers eagerly wanting instant answers to questions on a range of gadgets or where their orders might be) helping to ease the pressure on contact centre agents, having to deal with an influx of enquiries via phone, web chat, email and social media channels.

Our gift to you …

Christmas provides an opportunity for retailers to build consumer loyalty and trust if managed correctly. So Synthetix has a little pre-Christmas gift for customer experience advocates, the page turner that is ‘Multi-Channel Online Customer Service For Dummies?’